According to the Library of Congress, around 75% of movies made during Hollywood’s silent era have sadly been lost to time. Although there are far fewer lost films from later decades, there are always a few movies that slip through the cracks. But each year the number of lost films is reduced slightly thanks to dedicated archival work and chance finds.

A few of the most important finds of all include Frankenstein (1910), which was produced by Thomas Edison and is the first movie adaptation of Mary Shelley’s iconic horror novel, and The White Shadow (1924), which a young Alfred Hitchcock helped to write, direct, and edit. To add to their ranks, here are five famous long-lost films that have been found in the last few years.

1. Gugusse and the Automaton (1897)
2. Luke’s Double (1916)
3. The Heart of Lincoln (1922)
4. The Pill Pounder (1923)
5. No Such Thing as a Vampire (1968)

Gugusse and the Automaton (1897)

French filmmaker Georges Méliès was one of the pioneers of cinema, with his science fiction short A Trip to the Moon (1902) utilizing groundbreaking special effects techniques. Méliès made more than 500 films, but sadly only around 300 of them have survived. Many of his movies were actively destroyed, having been melted down for celluloid and silver during World War I. But thankfully, one more movie has recently been added to the surviving tally: Gugusse et l’Automate (Gugusse and the Automaton in English).

Long presumed lost, a copy of the 1897 short film was found in 2025 in a box of reels that had been donated to the Library of Congress by Bill McFarland. The reels had belonged to his great-grandfather, William Delisle Frisbee, who worked as a traveling film projectionist. “The moment we set our eyes on this box of film, we knew it was something special,” said George Willeman, the head of the Library’s nitrate film vaults.

Although Gugusse and the Automaton only clocks in at 45 seconds long, it occupies an important place in film history and features the earliest known onscreen appearance of a robot (a word that wasn’t even invented until a couple of decades later in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R.).

Luke’s Double (1916)

Silent-era comedy films were dominated by three big names: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. Early in his career, Lloyd was inspired by Chaplin to create a comic mustached onscreen character called Lonesome Luke, but many of these films have been lost.

In 2022, Robert Simonton managed to track down one of the missing Lonesome Luke movies: Luke’s Double (1916). Directed by Hal Roach, the film stars Lloyd’s brother, Gaylord Lloyd, as the character’s double. Simonton found out that a 28mm print of the comedy had been given to Harold Lloyd back in the mid-1960s, so he contacted the actor’s granddaughter, Suzanne Lloyd, to see if she knew where it was. She did, and delivered it to the UCLA Film & Television Archive so that it could be preserved.

The Heart of Lincoln (1922)

John Ford is one of the most iconic directors from the Golden Age of Hollywood, being particularly well-known for his many Westerns—including Stagecoach (1939) and The Searchers (1956)—and winning four Oscars for Best Director. Although not quite as big a name, his older brother, Francis Ford, was also in the movie-making business and frequently worked as both an actor and a director.

In the summer of 2024, intern Dan Martin was going through boxes at the Historic Films Archive in New York when he came across a copy of a Francis Ford film that had been missing for a century: The Heart of Lincoln. As well as being behind the camera, Ford also starred as Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War-era story. The movie was first shot in 1915, but Ford completely remade it in 1922. Neither version was thought to have survived until Martin stumbled across a copy of the later film. “It was very rewarding to end my internship on this high note,” Martin commented.

The Pill Pounder (1923)

In 2023, filmmaker Gary Huggins found a copy of an old cartoon that he was looking for at an auction in Omaha, Nebraska. To get the cartoon, he had to bid on an entire stack of vintage film cans, and his offer of $20 won. While looking through the reels later, he discovered that one of them was a lost film called The Pill Pounder—which features Clara Bow, one of Hollywood’s first starlets, in one of her first roles. “It was the best $20 I’ve ever invested, for sure,” he said.

Charles Murray is the star of the 1923 silent film—which is about a pharmacist trying to host a poker game in his drug store—with 17-year-old Clara Bow appearing in just a few scenes. It was only the third film she’d ever acted in, but her performance was praised by the Exhibitors Trade Review, which declared her “the most promising of the young actresses.” Just a few years later, Bow skyrocketed to fame, becoming Hollywood’s first “It Girl” in 1927.

No Such Thing as a Vampire (1968)

In 1968, the BBC aired a horror anthology series called Late Night Horror, but it was pulled from circulation just two years later due to complaints that it was too scary. None of the episodes were archived, but two have been recovered in the decades since: “The Corpse Can’t Play” was found in 2016, and series opener “No Such Thing as a Vampire” was found in May 2026.

“No Such Thing as a Vampire” is based on a short story of the same name by Richard Matheson—best-known for penning the vampire novel I Am Legend (1954)—and was directed by Paddy Russell, who just a couple of years earlier had become the first woman to direct an episode of Doctor Who.

An old reel of the vampire episode was found in The Regent, a 1930s art deco cinema in Dorset, England. A collection of reels had been gathering dust in the building for years, and projectionist Darren Payne was asked to look them over before they were binned. As a horror fan, when he saw the handwritten label that said Late Night Horror, his interest was piqued. When he played the reel, he realized that it was the first episode of the groundbreaking and controversial show. “I had to pinch myself; it was an astonishing and quite emotional moment,” Payne said.